I am thinking we need a ‘tool/site’ to (maybe that site is emacswiki, but we need to put data there programmingly, not human edit):

1. analyze the contents (all related to emacs) and present the data of overrall emacs trend : from emacs wiki, emacs news, blogs, packages etc. (Currently this is done per human reviews, but if we have a tool to aggregate all these, make data available to public, it will be awesome.

2. an interactive process to develop new packages: meaning with (1)’s overview, we may know what type of functionality is lacking (or existing) in current packages, code bases, where we can develop new packages/functionality (or improve existing packages/speed) in a collaborative way/ real time reponses to what the data show us (from 1.).

3. improve emacs lisp speed!!! why don’t we make it lightening fast?

JC

Really fast lisps require complicated JITs like those in Clozure or SBCL. I don’t think anyone is willing to write a new one just for emacs.

Jonathan Magen

Yeah but I’d like to see Emacs ported to CL…I know this has been pretty controversial in the past but I also know others share this dream.

Isaac Xin Pei

don’t know if someone can make faster lisp in emacs … but one possibility might be simply call lua (lua script) directly from emacs, especially luajit has FFI. I have been contemplating this for a while, will definately give it a try … unless someone else have tried.

jasonm23github

It’s being ported to Guile (another Lisp) this is a reasonably high priority GNU activity.

http://twitter.com/emisshula Evan Misshula

Thank you this would be great. Don’t take the whole project on yourself. Start a repository and let us all submit pull requests. I would love to contribute what I can.

François-Xavier Bois

It would great to have access to more “chrome” in the UI.
A file browser should not be inside a buffer but in a real “chrome” widget.
It would be great to have access to UI around the main buffer (to, left, right, bellow) window to put widgets, tabs, icons, file browser etc.

surio

FWIW, I am getting crashes everytime I run the latest emacs on Win 7? Did you encounter this yourself?

I know I suggested this before: A Tip-of-the-Day mode for both Emacs and eLisp would be awesome. One for each major mode might be nice, too.

If the scope is to look ahead five years, a mobile Emacs needs to be considered. I have the Emacs android app and Hacker’s keyboard, but I haven’t even started them up yet. I still regard the tablet as more of a recreational device, whereas Emacs is a productivity tool that I need for work. It’s somewhat confusing to use Emacs now on a laptop with a touchpad instead of mouse. I can’t imagine how a tablet version would work. Perhaps voice command (speech-to-text) will be the enabling mode to a widely-adopted mobile Emacs.

I have my own story of how I came to adopt Emacs. I’ll add that to my Emacs Wiki page when I get a chance. That page needs an update since I’m using version 24.1.1, and I’ve drifted away from org-mode.

Isaac Xin Pei

tip of the day is a great idea!

dodgethesteamroller

The most recent O’Reilly book on Emacs was the 3rd edition of _Learning Gnu Emacs_, which came out in 2004, and so much has changed since then. With the new resurgence of interest in Emacs over the past couple of years, I bet there’s a market for an Emacs Cookbook. This would overlap with much of the material on the Emacs Wiki, but since the latter is so disorganized and contains so much that is out of date, it’d be worth reorganizing and reediting it. Sacha, I think that sounds like a great job for you… why not send O’Reilly a book proposal?

Jonathan Magen

I’d love to see an online edition edited by the community (perhaps as org-mode files on github) even if O’Reilly doesn’t want in on it!

http://sachachua.com sachac

I like the idea of pouring most of that writing/editing energy into EmacsWiki or something similar, and then maybe repackaging parts of it as coherent e-books. =)

dodgethesteamroller

No argument here–a greatly improved EmacsWiki would definitely help (both to promote Emacs to new users and to help out current users), as would some e-books on particular topics–but I still think there’s a market for dead trees. (Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.)

http://sachachua.com sachac

Yup, the (as yet unwritten) e-books should be available from print-on-demand-type publishers (or maybe even proper publishers!). We’ll see! Must write first. =)

Jonathan Magen

As a working Rails developer, I’d really love to see more focus on the Ruby/Rails community as Vim has gained plenty of traction there. In a room full of Ruby folks, only a few of them use Emacs but *many* use Vim or Sublime. I will gladly help out with this in any way I can.

jasonm23github

I’d like to see rinari get some additional features (deteting / providing an interface to generators, rake tasks etc. would be pretty awesome)

Also a few things like best practice patterns as YASnippets would also be cool.

Note: the ruby-refactor package came out a few days ago on melpa, still need to check that out.

Recent comments

JohnKitchin Thanks. That matches my current understanding too. It seems like use-package pretty conveniently installs and configures packages. I have seen cask for creating and installing... – Emacs configuration and use-package